In March 1958, six months before the official conversion of the NACA to NASA, an ad hoc committee of some thirty-five NACA engineers had started planning for what they suspected would be the inevitable: sending a man into space. The committee was named the Space Task Group. Soon after NASA’s creation, the goal was made official, and the group was charged with putting a man into orbit as quickly as possible.
A man in space; to most Americans, it sounded like science fiction. Space, or outer space, was generally considered to begin at around a hundred kilometers, or sixty-two miles, above the Earth, where the planet’s atmosphere ended. No human had so much as approached that rarefied air, or lack of it. The airplane, introduced in 1903, had only recently reached that altitude. On September 7, 1956, test pilot Iven Kincheloe had flown a Bell X-2 rocket plane to a height of 23.92 miles—an impressive distance above the Earth but still a long way from space.
Chosen to helm the Space Task Group was forty-five-year-old Robert Gilruth, a large, mostly bald man with thick, dark eyebrows who possessed an enduring and infectious passion for flight. He had been working in the NACA’s test-engineering area since 1937 and in aeronautics even before that. As a young boy, he’d constructed his own rubber-band-powered model airplanes, and as an aeronautical engineering student at the University of Minnesota, he had helped design the world’s fastest airplane. After eight years as a “dirty-hands” engineer, he had made a name for himself in the area of high-speed flight, and he was appointed director of his own fiefdom, the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division, whose purview included guided missiles and, eventually, supersonic flight. He was soft-spoken and, like von Braun, had a knack for inspiring those around him to do their best—he hired good people and mostly left them alone. His management style owed something to the Socratic method. “He never once told me what I should do,” an employee would later remember about meetings with Gilruth, but nonetheless, he said, “I never once left not knowing what I should do.” He believed in a bottom-up organization with as few bureaucratic layers as possible, where the lowest technician could talk to the highest-level manager. He inspired unequivocal loyalty, and it led to impressive results.
His chief designer was thirty-seven-year-old Maxime Faget, a brilliant engineer, small in physical stature, who had been working for Gilruth since 1946 and designing rocket-powered aircraft almost as long. Another young flight-research engineer, thirty-four-year-old Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., was slim, dark-haired, and intense; he was a local boy, born and bred in the small town of Phoebus, just seven miles from Langley. He’d tried to enlist as an eighteen-year-old early in World War II but was rejected due to his damaged right hand, which had been badly burned in a fire when he was three. After graduating from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1944 with a degree in aeronautical engineering, he’d spent fifteen impressive years with NACA in flight-test operations. It didn’t take him long to start contributing—in the last year of the war, he’d helped solve problems in the P-47 Thunderbolt and the P-51 Mustang and was made project engineer on the P-80 Shooting Star, the first American-made jet fighter. Along the way he developed a palpable competence and confidence, an aura of leadership that inspired those he worked with.
Kraft’s orders from his boss were to write the flight plan for the first program missions—launch, orbital, reentry, and recovery. “Chris, you come up with a basic mission plan,” he was told. “You know, the bottom-line stuff on how we fly a man from a launchpad into space and back again. It would be good if you kept him alive.” Kraft’s flight-operations division would control the spacecraft and monitor every aspect of its progress—and every biomedical detail of its occupant—in real time, through telemetry and other methods. Kraft realized that this quantum leap in ground support would require more than the traditional reinforced-concrete blockhouse; the concept of the mission control center was born and would quickly become reality. Someone would have to coordinate all this and make final decisions. Kraft wanted to be that person, and so the role of flight director was created. Soon he and everyone else were working sixty-hour weeks and bringing work home. No one at NASA complained; most didn’t even think of it as work. This was fine for single employees but hard on the married ones, who spent less time with their families.
Faget, Kraft, and forty-four other NACA employees—thirty-five engineers, eight female secretaries and “computers” (professional mathematicians adept at operating mechanical calculators), and one male file clerk—would form the nucleus of the NASA division that would handle manned spaceflight.
On December 17, 1958—the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk—America’s first manned space program, Project Mercury, was announced. Named for the Roman messenger of the gods, its mission was simple: to put a man into orbit and return him safely to Earth. They had the rocket. They had the flight plan. But they were missing one important part: the man. But who should they hire? What were the requirements for a job that had never before existed?
The men in the program would need to be accustomed to danger—they had to know how to cope, and cope well, in high-pressure situations. The initial idea was to find individuals with experience in high-risk or stressful jobs, people who had developed the requisite level of toughness: test pilots, deep-sea divers, mountaineers, race-car drivers, balloonists, submariners, polar explorers, parachutists. Professionals in these fields were all considered, along with acrobats and contortionists; NASA, it appeared, would soon be recruiting from the country’s circuses. (Other candidates that were suggested, half seriously, were midgets, since they took up less room; women, for their greater fortitude; Eskimos, because they were smaller and accustomed to different solar cycles; and Buddhist monks, who were less “time-oriented” and could put themselves in a trancelike state.)
But before the ranks of those stressful professions could be scrutinized, and before the halls of NASA’s medical-testing facilities began resembling circus auditions, President Eisenhower was advised against choosing from such a broad pool of candidates. Not only would the process threaten to become the butt of jokes, but security clearances—since there would be classified aspects of the program—would complicate hiring. Another factor played a part in his decision not to cast such a wide net. “Ike felt it would be embarrassing,” remembered a psychologist involved in the selection process, “for us to be going out to select astronauts when the best we could do at the time was a grapefruit-sized satellite.” So in December 1958, the president decreed that the applicant pool would be limited to the nation’s test pilots. (Of course, that meant men only, since there were no female military test pilots.) This would simplify both security concerns and the process itself, because their detailed personnel records were already on file. They would also be accustomed to pressure suits, complex cockpits, and the discipline of military life, since even civilian test pilots were former military men. And maybe, just maybe, their extensive flying experience would play an important part in the success of a mission, despite the automated capsule planned.
So in January 1959, NASA published the qualifications for the job of “Research Astronaut-Candidate.” The starting salary would be between $8,330 and $12,770, a quite comfortable amount for the time. The minimum requirements for the job included fifteen hundred hours of flying time, graduation from test-pilot school, excellent physical condition, being between twenty-five and forty years old and no taller than five eleven (to fit into the small one-man capsule that was on the drawing boards), and having a bachelor’s degree in engineering or the equivalent. The “equivalent”—as in, a technical degree other than engineering—would make an important difference to the future of U.S. space exploration.
Some worried that this new program was just another of the many man-in-space projects that already existed or had already been canceled. The air force had the X-15, Dyna-Soar, Man in Space Soonest (the final stage of which would be a moon landing), and another lunar-landing program, the top secret Project Lunex; the army had Project
Adam; and the navy had a plan for a Manned Earth Reconnaissance spacecraft. There was also the concern that being part of this program might sidetrack a military man’s career. Despite these qualms, the records of 508 test pilots were pulled. By January, that number had been whittled down to 110 who met the minimum standards. They were divided into three groups; the first two groups were invited to Washington for a top secret briefing about the Mercury project. The third group was kept in reserve in case not enough pilots in the first two groups decided to apply.
Though the pilots were assured that they would have a significant role in operating the Mercury capsule, some of the men thought it sounded like a stunt, not a serious research program. Put a man in orbit? For what purpose? And if and when that was accomplished, what then? But others were intrigued by the engineering challenge. They were test pilots, men addicted to flying the highest, the fastest, the farthest—and this venture offered the distant promise of exceeding the known limits in each of these categories. It was a test pilot’s dream, and as one of the men chosen would point out, “This was a chance for immortality.”
Some men declined, but most in the first two groups agreed to apply, so the third group wasn’t brought in. That left almost seventy applicants. That number was soon shaved down to fifty-six, and a month later, after in-depth interviews and psychological tests, thirty-two candidates were invited to undergo various examinations that would result in six winners of the spaceman sweepstakes.
The physical exams came first. For eight days at the private Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which specialized in aerospace medicine, doctors and scientists conducted more than sixty tests on their subjects. Every organ, orifice, system, and body part was thoroughly scrutinized. Many of the exams were based on physicals administered to potential U-2 spy pilots, but since the medical corps had little idea of what would happen to a human in the weightless vacuum of space, with its extremes of heat and cold, some of the tests were speculative. Most had their origins in air force space-medicine research collected over the previous decade. (Doctors were particularly concerned by the high incidence of “anal problems”—mostly hemorrhoids—in the fliers, so after a cleansing enema, each candidate was subjected to an especially thorough proctosigmoidoscopy with a tool the subjects dubbed the “steel eel.”) The candidates were tested from early morning through late evening and spent hours on stationary bikes, on treadmills, on tilt tables, and in centrifuges. (Though none of them approached the astounding record of eighty-three and a half g’s that an air force officer named Eli Beeding would reach a few years later, resulting in spinal bruising and temporary paralysis and blindness. As a comparison, an automobile crashing into a brick wall at forty-five miles an hour reaches only sixty g’s.) They also delivered innumerable stool, urine, and semen samples. At the end of the eight days, only one of the thirty-two was deemed unhealthy enough to be eliminated, and that was solely for a high bilirubin level in his blood (a usually temporary finding).
Psychological and stress evaluations were next, so the men were immediately flown to the Wright Aeromedical Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. More than two dozen exams were administered. Some were classics, such as the Rorschach ink-blot test and the 566-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which assessed psychopathology. Others resembled parlor games, such as Draw-a-Person and Who Am I?, which required the candidate to write twenty answers to that question. (The first several answers—“I am a father,” “I am a naval officer,” “I am an American”—were easy, but after a while the subject was forced to a deeper level of self-examination and, hopefully, self-revelation.) Another favorite test was showing a blank card to a subject and asking what he saw in it. These and other tests evaluated personality, intellect, aptitude, peer sociability, and motivation, among many other traits. Psychiatrists delved into each man’s adolescence to root out any feelings of sexual inadequacy that might have fueled his interest in high-performance aircraft. Then came half a dozen psychological-stress tests designed to evaluate each man’s capacity to tolerate conditions expected in space. Some involved the subject’s reactions to isolation, low pressure, severe vibrations, loud noises, extreme heat and cold, or blinking strobe lights; others had no discernible goal. Indeed, since no one knew precisely what the men would face during a mission, many of the tests had been invented for these evaluations and seemed bizarre—for instance, blindfolding the subject, sticking a hose in an ear, and pumping cold water into his ear canal until he was dizzy, or submerging a man’s feet in a bucket of ice-filled water until they went numb or he couldn’t take it anymore. Some tests might have been added just to measure the participants’ determination. “They were free to be deliberately brutal,” said one pilot, calling the doctors “sadists to a man.” One doctor admitted as much: “We did our best to drive them crazy,” he said. Throughout, the candidates were constantly photographed for medical records, sometimes when they were naked, often in embarrassing or undignified poses, the cameras pointing into virtually every orifice.
They were all active-duty pilots in excellent health, so none of the thirty-one washed out. But the barrage of tests and interviews helped rank which were more psychologically and physically suited for the job. When the dust—and heart rates and blood pressure—had settled, the doctors recommended eighteen men “without medical reservations.” After a three-man committee reevaluated their interviews and reviewed their engineering acumen, seven men were rated ever so slightly higher than the rest, though the final results were kept strictly confidential. Bob Gilruth, director of the Space Task Group, decided to accept all seven. (Apparently none of the seven had been rejected for either of two little-known causes found in “Medical Standards for Selection of Crews”: “extreme ugliness” or “any deformity which is markedly repulsive.”) An especially important consideration was each man’s ability to relate and interact effectively with others, because success in the program would depend on the men working with thousands of people toward an ultimate goal years down the road.
On the first two days of April, the chosen seven were called and invited to join the program. For some of them, the decision wasn’t easy. They all had promising careers and likely promotions in their futures—and, possibly, fulfillment of dreams they’d spent their entire adult lives chasing. But this new aspiration had taken root, and every man accepted.
At two in the afternoon on April 9, 1959, at a press conference in a small ballroom at NASA’s temporary headquarters in the Dolley Madison House in downtown Washington, DC, the “astronaut volunteers” were introduced to the world: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter “Wally” Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald “Deke” Slayton. They were all married with children, each with an apparently perfect family, though a few of the marriages were far from it, a fact that would not be revealed until years later.
The Mercury Seven represented the air force and the navy equally—three men from each—with a Marine (Glenn) thrown in. For ninety minutes, the seven career military men sat at a long table in alphabetical order, dressed in conservative business suits and smiling nervously at the crowd of two hundred, while photographers pushed and shoved for better shots and reporters bombarded them with questions. Most of their responses were short and uninformative, but then the redheaded Glenn, who had recently set a transcontinental speed record and thus had some experience in dealing with the press, spoke thoughtfully about his wife and family and their support of his flying career. A few of the others rose to the challenge and supplied more in-depth answers. Glenn waxed eloquent on the program, comparing it to Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk: “I think we stand on the verge of something as big and as expansive as that was fifty years ago.” If the crowd’s reaction was any indication, he was the odds-on favorite to be the first in space.
The next day, the classmates of Gus Grissom’s second-grader, Scott, hoisted the boy on their shoulders and carried him around the schoolyard. Then they called for a speech, and Scott
told them what he knew about his dad’s new job. The deification had begun.
Within days, the seven “astronauts”—the name they were given, to distinguish them from the Russian cosmonauts—became American heroes, long in advance of any astronautical achievements. They had volunteered for something that no one—not even their new colleagues at NASA—expected all of them to survive. Virtually every hero myth of America—Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and so forth—was invoked. Perhaps more often, though, an enormously popular comic-strip and movie-serial hero came to mind. The parallels with the present conflict were vivid; each of these seven was Buck Rogers, an American transported to the twenty-fifth century, battling, as a book based on Buck’s adventures put it,
the terrible Red Mongols, cruel, greedy, and unbelievably ruthless, who for a time, all too long, utterly crushed a large part of humanity in a slavery frightful to contemplate. In their great battle craft, sliding across the sky…like a scourge over all North America, with their terrible disintegrator rays blasting men and entire cities into nothingness.
But what truly amazed people—and what was invariably emphasized in the newspaper stories over the next few days—was that their wives backed them in their desire to strap themselves into a capsule atop a rocket originally built to deliver nuclear warheads. Each wife was asked a variation of “Aren’t you worried that he’ll be killed?” more than once. Publicly, each one dutifully supported her husband’s choice and downplayed the worry and the danger, which was nothing new to a test pilot’s wife. Most Americans, it was clear, expected some of the men to die—after all, about half of the rockets launched blew up. Even Lloyd’s of London, renowned for insuring almost anything, from Marlene Dietrich’s legs to a yo-yo champion’s fingers, would not cover these seven men.
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